[free California workers' compensation resources]

A defense attorney friend of mine called me up yesterday to say (I’m paraphrasing here), “You jackass. Thanks to your Ogilvie proof every Applicant’s attorney I know is calling me up, gloating, and asking for 18 points on top of the whole person impairment on every case! Why the hell did you do that???”1 My first thought was of my favorite quote from Swingers.2 What I actually said was something along the lines of:

It’s not like CAAA wouldn’t have found out about Ogilvie if it wasn’t for Jay Shergill mentioning it in a blog post.

For the moment, let’s set aside the issue of whether California’s injured workers have gotten a raw deal since SB899. Suppose there’s an injured worker with a finger injury, stays on temporary disability for two years, and is immediately made permanent and stationary. If instead they get a 0% WPI, they get nothing. If they gets a 1% WPI, Ogilvie tells us this person gets a DFEC adjusted WPI of 19%.

Nearly every litigated case involves an extended period of temporary disability and a whole person impairment less than 45.4Ogilvie effectively removes the first 18% permanent partial disability levels.

Please keep in mind that this is not a life pension with SAWW / COLA increase commutation calculator. The actuarial math involved in performing that calculation is … intense.

As an interesting side note, this week I saw my very first DEU commutation of a life pension with COLA increase. Unlike the typical commutations everyone receives from the DEU, this commutation calculation was devoid of the actual methodology used. I was pretty disappointed to find this out.

Last week while Steve was at the Sacramento WCAB he heard about a recent case that held the COLA / SAWW adjustments and increases are calculated based upon the first January 1 following the date of injury. 12

This case involving SIF (the subsequent injuries fund) is from the San Jose WCAB. The name of the case is “XYZZXSJO2 v. Subsequent Injuries Benefits Trust Fund, ADJ 1510738, SJO 0251902”. The name of the Applicant was anonymized to protect their identity. 34

Thus far the conventional wisdom has been that the COLA/SAWW increases are calculated starting with the first January 1 after life pension gets paid out. This is a tremendous change in the COLA/SAWW calculation of life pension.

Assuming a 1/1/2003 injury at exactly 70% permanent partial disability, there would be 426.5 weeks of permanent disability paid after the permanent and stationary date before the life pension gets paid out. This equates to 8.2 years from the permanent and stationary date that has, thus far, not been taken into account with life pension calculations to date. To put this in perspective, if someone had an injury on 1/1/2003 and became P&S on that same date5 , the traditional method of calculating the life pension with COLA / SAWW increase would be too low by approximately 44%.

At the moment I’m finalizing a COLA / SAWW life pension calculator to determine what the future life pension rates are assuming a COLA / SAWW increase of 4.7% per year. If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester for this COLA / SAWW calculator for life pension increases, please drop me a line and ask for access.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a citation for the 4.7% COLA / SAWW increase, but I believe it to be the offiical average used by the DEU6 to calculate commutations of COLA / SAWW increases and adjustments. If you have an official citation or document from the DEU, please drop me a line so I can include that citation here!

Last Friday I announced some “website tweaks.” Since then a paid subscriber1 reiterated a feature request.2 As a paid subscriber, he is able to calculate an unlimited number of ratings so that they all show up on a single page. Basically, he wanted to be able to see the dollar value for a particular permanent partial disability percentage at the same time as a rating.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with the problems in creating such a feature. There are several problems with incorporating this feature into the calculator’s page.

The rating calculator does not require the date of injury, just the age of the injured worker. Without the date of injury, the website cannot properly display the dollar value of a permanent partial disability percentage.

When a paid subscriber has performed more than one rating calculation on a page, the website cannot decide which rating string to convert into the equivalent number of dollars.

This exact feature had been suggested by other users in the past.3 My original thinking was that trying to accommodate this feature request would involve too many unknown variables. After giving the matter some more thought, here’s what I’ve come up with:

Paid subscribers benefit from improved print formatting. Basically, I’ve created a special file that changes the way the calculator page looks when a paid subscriber is printing. 4 Paid subscribers benefit from having the calculator page streamlined specifically for printing.

Paid subscribers can have more than one calculator open at a time. This one feature probably addresses 90% of this user’s concerns. If you’re able to keep both calculators open at the same time, it should be easy to perform a rating and then turn the percentage into a dollar value.

Paid subscribers receive automatic calculations of dollar value of ratings. When a paid subscriber performs a rating calculation, the “Dollar Value of Permanent Disability” calculator automatically opens and the dollar value of the rating is automatically calculated. The user will still have to adjust calculation to account for the year of the injury. However, this is probably the most elegant solution to this issue.